Liam Proud

Jeff Mason is a White House Correspondent for Reuters and the 2016-2017 president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. He was the lead Reuters correspondent for President Barack Obama's 2012 campaign and interviewed the president at the White House in 2015. Jeff has been based in Washington since 2008, when he covered the historic race between Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Jeff started his career in Frankfurt, Germany, where he covered the airline industry before moving to Brussels, Belgium, where he covered the European Union. He is a Colorado native, proud graduate of Northwestern University and former Fulbright scholar.

LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - Sky and BT are imposing unfamiliar austerity on British soccer. Three years after they agreed to pay 5.1 billion pounds for broadcast rights, the two companies bought the rights to air a similar number of games for 4.5 billion pounds. That suggests a self-destructive bidding war has ended, and will force the Premier League to look to new bidders and international rights to make up the difference.

LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - Rupert Murdoch’s next foe in his battle for Sky may be hedge funds. The tycoon’s Twenty-First Century Fox should be able to win regulatory approval to buy the 61 percent it doesn’t own of the pay-TV group. But holdouts could attempt to sink the deal unless they get a higher price.

LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - Britain’s competition regulator delivered a blow to Rupert Murdoch on Tuesday, but he’s still in the game. Twenty-First Century Fox’s 11.7 billion pound bid for Sky would give the 86-year-old mogul too much control over UK news, the antitrust authorities said. The deal could nevertheless go ahead.

LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters Breakingviews) - Tech groups like Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet are attracting increasing political heat for their dominance of markets like e-commerce, social media and web search. But a recently discovered security flaw in chips made by Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and ARM highlights another important concern: bugs potentially affecting hardware found in the majority of computing devices.

LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - Soccer fans have found a topic as contentious as refereeing decisions: eye-watering transfer fees. The 222 million euros that Paris St Germain paid Barcelona for Brazilian star Neymar in August - a sum described by Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger as “beyond rationality” - may not be surpassed in 2018. Nonetheless, clubs will have good reason to open their cheque books even wider.

LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - The “Brexit and British Politics” author explains how last year’s vote to leave the EU became the UK’s defining political issue. He says longer-term political undercurrents helped tip the balance towards Leave – and will dictate the type of Brexit the country ends up with.

LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - It’s easy to forget that, until recently, Britain’s relationship with Europe was of little concern to most voters. A month before the 1997 general election, pollster Ipsos MORI asked Britons to name the issues that would decide which party they voted for. Less than a quarter mentioned the European Union. Its salience fell to 14 percent in 2001 and lingered in the single digits for more than a decade. So how did the 2016 referendum lead to the highest turnout in a nationwide vote for 24 years, with the majority siding against the government?

LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - Walt Disney is hovering like the Death Star over European telecom groups' media dreams. The likes of BT are investing in sports and other content to sell to their customers. With rival pay-TV group Sky soon to be owned by the maker of Star Wars movies, which feature the planet-destroying space station, some may be forced into retreat.

LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - Bookmakers adjust the odds to make sure they can make money whatever happens. GVC’s 3.9 billion pound bid for Ladbrokes Coral Group is trying to do something similar, by using financial engineering to hedge the risk of a government clampdown on its target’s business.

LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - The Daily Mail is finally succumbing to the media industry’s malaise. After years of defying gravity while rival publishers watched circulation and revenue crash, the right-wing tabloid’s parent company expects its media business to shrink next year. That complicates boss Paul Zwillenberg’s plan to show that Daily Mail and General Trust is more than a struggling publisher.

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